Twitter Planning Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

Twitter Inc., having failed to sell itself, is planning to fire about 8 percent of its workforce as the struggling social-media company prepares to go it alone for the time being.

Twitter may eliminate about 300 people, the same percentage it did last year when co-founder Jack Dorsey took over as chief executive officer, according to people familiar with the matter. Planning for the cuts is still fluid and the number could change, they added. The people asked not to be identified talking about private company plans.

An announcement about the job reductions may come before Twitter releases third-quarter earnings on Thursday, one of the people said. A Twitter representative declined to comment.

Twitter, which is unprofitable, is trying to control spending as sales growth slows. The company recently hired bankers to explore a sale, but the companies that had expressed interest in bidding — Salesforce.com Inc., The Walt Disney Co. and Alphabet Inc. — later backed out from the process.

The job cuts suggest Twitter isn’t in a position to beat analysts’ estimates for results in the third quarter or its outlook for the fourth, Loop Capital analyst Blake Harper wrote in a note to clients. He rates the stock hold.

Twitter shares fell as much as 4.9 percent Tuesday. They were down 4.2 percent to $17.28 at 11:16 a.m. in New York.

Twitter’s losses and 40 percent fall in its share price the past 12 months have made it more difficult for the company to pay its engineers with stock. That has made it harder for Twitter to compete for talent with giant rivals like Alphabet Inc., Google and Facebook Inc. Reducing employee numbers would relieve some of this pressure.

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Defeated senatorial candidate Francis Tolentino yesterday told the Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET) that Sen. Leila de Lima used “drug money” in her campaign to win the 12th Senate seat in the May 9 balloting.

The former chair of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) finished 13th in the senatorial race with nearly 1.3 million votes behind De Lima. Tolentino appeared at the preliminary conference of the nine-member SET on his electoral protest against the former justice secretary.

Tolentino was roundly criticized for sponsoring a lewd show of the girl group “Playgirls” in Laguna in October 2015. He was supposed to join De Lima in the senatorial slate of the then ruling Liberal Party, but the incident prompted him to cut his ties from the party of his close friend, former President Aquino.

“One of the issues we answered was the reply of De Lima that she did not have money for the campaign,” Tolentino told reporters.

He also claimed that the manipulation of the vote count for the senatorial race was committed during the transmission of the results.

While admitting that De Lima’s lead over him was substantial, he argued that the total number of votes they garnered should not matter as he was questioning how the election results were transmitted.

“That’s not the issue here,” he said. “It’s about the electronic transmission… because it was possible that there was double transmission… It’s not about the number (of votes) or the (margin) of her lead.”

He noted that senators who won were separated only by about 800,000 votes.